Optimize for Search Engines or Users? - Matt cutts video transcript

By the Way I shoot my disclaimer to somebody in Google video's team and he said matt you look like you had been kidnapped so maybe I should be some rocket boom world map or something like that out there you guys worry more about the information that how pretty it looks I am guessing, alright todder writes in my simply question is this "which do you find more important in developing and maintaining a website search engine optimization or end user optimization?"

And that says ill hang up and listen, todder that's a great question well both are very important and I think if you don't have both you wont do the best you want to do, I think search engine optimization its harder to be found if you don't have end user optimization you don't get conversion you don't get people to really stay and really enjoy your site post in your forum or buy your product or anything else. SO I think you do need both the trick in my mind is to try to see the world such that they are the same thing. You want to make it look best so that the user's interest and the search engine interest are as aligned as you can and if you can do that then you are usually in very good shape because you have compeling content you have people want to visit your site. It will be very easy for your visitors to get around and for search engines to get around. And you don't have to do any weird tricks anything you do for search engines are also be shown to users. So I think you need to balance both of them.

Tedsey writes in with a couple of interesting questions "can you point us to some spam detection tools, I want to monitor my site to make sure I come out clean and show that I am valid among the no good spamming competitors. Well if you sure want to check spamming some tools you can use.



First of in Google we have lot of tools to detect and flag spam but most of them are not out side of Google one thing you can look at is Yahoo site explorer which is good it actually shows backlinks for specific pages or per domain I think that could be very handy. There are also other tools that could show you everything in one IP address, if you are going to be on a virtual host you are going to share with a lot of perfectly normal sites but sometimes there might be a lot of bad spam sites on that Ip address and you could end up in the wrong way. So you got to be careful that you are not automatically considered part of something wrong. As far as checking your specific site is concerned I will definitely hit Google sitemaps in webmaster console that will tell you crawl errors or other problems we found.

Second question tedsey asks "What about the cleanliness of code for example W3C, any chance that the accessible problem will leak into the main algorithm?" People had been asking me this for a long time and my typical answer is normal people write code with errors it just happens all the time. Eric one of the founders of the HTML standards said 40% of all html pages have syntax errors and there is no way a search engine can remove 40% of its contents from its index just because somebody didn't validate or something like that. So there are a lot of content especially content that is manmade students that already use or things like that its very quality but probably doesn't validate. So if you asked me a while a go I would have said yah I don't have a signal like that in our algorithms and its probably for a good reason that said now T.V Raman had done the work on accessible search and you know I am sure in future somebody can look at for a possible positive signal. If you have pass through the quality you have to pass through vigorous validation and stuff like that in general its great idea to go and get your site validated. But I wouldn't put that in top of your list, I would put on making compelling content and making a great site at the top of your list and once you have got that you can go back and dug your eyes and check whether you got good accessibility as well. Well you always want to have good accessibility but validating and closing off that last few things usually that doesn't matter a lot for search engines.

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